January 2022 • Macworld 21that it showed during the two previous
transitions? Twelve months later, the
answers are much clear: we’re in the
brightest timeline.
THE MAC IS IN
A SAFER PLACE
Right away it was clear that the M1
would provide to the Mac what we
had all hoped it would: impressive
performance and excellent power
efficiency – leading to great battery
life on laptops. Over the past year, as
Apple-designed chips have spread to
most Mac models, those facts have
remained intact.
In just the past couple of months,
one of the biggest questions of
the entire chip
transition has
been answered.
The M1 chip was
capable enough
to run lower-end
systems that
needed about as
much processing
power as an iPad
Pro, but could
Apple’s chips scale
to meet the needs
of professional
Mac users? With
the release of the
MacBook Pro with M1 Pro and M1
Max chips, we got the answer. It’s
a definitive yes.
This was not a given. It’s easy
to say “just throw more processor
and graphics cores at the problem”,
but computer performance doesn’t
necessarily scale so easily. Apple’s
advantage really came into play with
its unified memory architecture,
which doesn’t just offer a lot of fast
memory for processing operations,
but also offers an enormous pool of
fast memory for GPU use.
A few years ago, if you had told me
that Mac laptops would be shipping
with 10-core processors with 32-core
GPUs, I would believe you, but I wouldApple’s unified memory architecture gives the company an
advantage over Intel.